Miners drag FTSE 100 lower on China worries

The blue-chips started the new week on the back foot.

London’s blue-chip shares started the new week on the back foot, with developments in China unsettling the heavyweight mining sector, which dragged the wider market lower.

News that China may introduce tighter property rules to help slow rising prices, a move that could reduce demand for commodities, weighed on the miners, with shares in copper producer Kazakhmys down 4.8pc, Eurasian Natural Resources Corporation falling 3.3pc and Rio Tinto shedding 3pc.

The weakness among the miners, which have a heavy weighting in the FTSE 100, helped pull the wider benchmark index 28 points lower in early trade. Worries over the US sequester, a raft of spending cuts that kicked-in at the start of March, also dampened trader sentiment in the broader market.

Elsewhere among the individual fallers in London, HSBC slipped 2.7pc after reporting pre-tax profit for 2012 that missed market expectations.

Shares in blue-chip retailer Next shed 1.7pc and mid-capper Home Retail, the owner of Argos, lost 4pc in the wake of a cut “neutral” from “buy” by analysts at UBS, who argued that the weak pound and rising inflation was beginning to “squeeze the consumer”.

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“Our latest update of our UK household cash flow model suggests that our typical household will not be as well-off as we previously envisaged,” the UBS experts said.

Bucking the downward trend was distribution group Bunzl, which climbed 2.3pc after disclosing it had bought a medical and healthcare product supplier in Brazil. The shares, which recorded the biggest gain on the FTSE 100 this morning, were also helped by an upgrade to “neutral” at UBS.